These ancient villages would have seemed to us most unattractive places.  The houses were crowded close together.  The streets were only narrow crooked lanes between the houses.  In the rear room of each house were the stalls of the family ox and ass.  The brays of the ass were the alarm clock in the early morning.  There was no drainage.  Garbage was thrown into the street.  There were smells of all varieties.  One is not surprised by the frequent stories of pestilences in the Old-Testament history.

=Compensations of village life.=—­It seems strange that people who were accustomed to life in the open desert should have ever brought themselves to settle down in these dirty, ill-smelling places.  Surely, at first they must often have been homesick for the clean, pure air of the plains.  On the other hand, probably most of them were willing to put up with the disagreeable odors and the dirty streets for the sake of being near other people.  The desert was lonesome.  In the village there was always something going on, something to hear and see, gossip of weddings and courtships and quarrels.  Even to-day we find it hard to persuade those who are accustomed to the city to live in the country.  Even though their city home may be a dark tenement in the slums, yet they enjoy being in a crowd of their fellow men.  The country seems lonesome.

LESSONS IN HOUSE BUILDING

This village and town life, like the work on the farm, was a new school for the Hebrew shepherds, and set many an interesting problem for them to solve.  They had to learn to build and repair houses.  They were most often built of rough stones set in mud.  The mud, when dry, became fairly hard, but not like mortar or cement.  It was always easy for a thief “to dig through and steal,” as Jesus so graphically described.  Even though no thief came the dried mud was always crumbling, leaving holes between the stones through which snakes or lizards could crawl.  In such a house, if a man should lean against the wall, it might easily happen that a serpent would bite him, as the prophet Amos suggests.[3]

=Primitive Homes.=—­The floor of the average poor man’s house was simply the hard ground.  The flat roof was made of poles thatched with straw or brushwood and covered over with mud or clay.  There was seldom more than one room.  Often there were no windows; even in the palaces of kings there were in those days no windows of glass.  In one corner of the room there was a fireplace where the family cooking was done.  There was no chimney, however, and the smoke had to go out through the open door.  The door itself was generally fastened to a post, the lower end of which turned in a hollow socket in a heavy stone.  When the family went away from home the door was locked with a huge wooden key, which was carried, not in the pocket, like our keys, but over the shoulder.  Such keys had this advantage, at any rate, over ours.  You could not very well lose them and you did not need a key ring.